Wipe out (the house)

This house does not have a porch or a backyard with a working light. So whenever I need to have a cigarette, I go outside, to the front, with the cars and the trees. Into the cold, into the sun, into the wind, into the whatever. Sometimes I’ll sit on the hood of my car with my coffee and I’ll watch the smoke of my own death blow out in front of my face. My friends all tell me I have a problem, and I never tell them they’re wrong.

Tonight it is raining. It has not rained in a while, but tonight it has ebbed and flowed in waves. Sometimes I hear it bashing against the walls of the house, sometimes it gets so quiet I forget it was ever raining at all. I’m sitting alone but the house behind me is filled with a tired sort of life.

It’s fucking freezing and I really should’ve worn that second jacket - should I go and get it?- but I’ve already lit my cigarette and I can’t take it back inside but jesus christ my arms are freezing and the wind grips my forearms with frosty fingers and fuck, I’m cold.

I see a man through the rain. He is writing something over and over and over again on the glass of a window stained with the teardrops of the world and I wonder what it is that he writes about. To write about something over and over and over again is endless and endlessly tiring and I wonder if the words he writes holds stories or answers or both.

It is a search, he says. For what? I remember asking him, although I was never really able to ask him, but he gave me the answer all the same - for myself, he says. As he writes over and over and over again, I learn that it is his name he is writing and it is himself for which he is searching.

I am looking at him and it is wet but he is not. And although he is on the other side of that icy windowpane, he doesn’t look warm, he too, looks as if he is shivering in the frost of the void of his own name.

He is a small man - I say this and I know he is probably taller than me - but I say he is small because he’s dwarfed by the mess of ink that covers half of his face which is already half covered by the glass, and that ink, with his words and his soul, slowly drips down to the ground. I can barely see him beneath it all, but his hand, with that pen - that writing hand of his - peeks out from the mess of ink and water and questions that have no answers.

The floorboards behind me creak - I wonder what my new housemates wonder about me: do I smoke too often, do they think, I wonder. My cigarette is almost out, should I have another? no I really shouldn’t, it’s a terrible habit to have picked up, I should go inside. But I don’t want to be in that house anymore.

I too, search, and so I cannot help but curiously examine this man across from me, so tired, but tirelessly writing over and over again, his own name, in a desperate search for his own identity.

I, too, am tired, and write tirelessly.

I don’t think I’ll have that second smoke after all.

I sit here right now. I sit here frustrated and tired and angry. I sit here furiously typing at a laptop I have abused almost as much as my own body. I sit here wondering how long I can do this all for.

A name can hold so much, it holds a person, a light, a place, a time, a thing. It holds a spot in this universe as fixed and as surely as anything could hold anything in place, and I know this for I have been around many placeholders and placeholder people, and nothing. in this world is ever permanent.